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Help!

Getting in touch

How can I contact you?

We're always interested in hearing what people think. You can email us at [email protected]

Follow blogtrottr on Twitter

Subscribing to feeds

How often will I get updates?

Blogtrottr provides a variety of schedules for you to choose from:

  • Real time - every update gets its own email.
    • Free plan - real time for PuSH enabled feeds, or we poll every hour for non-PuSH feeds.
    • Paid plans - real time - via PuSH, or our Advanced Polling for non-PuSH feeds.
  • 2/4/6/8/12 hourly or daily digests - multiple updates are rolled into a single email.

What is PuSH?

If your feeds support PubSubHubub, then you can expect to get an update within a couple minutes of a new item being posted. Typically email leaves our system with 10 seconds of us being notified - although the internet being what it is, the email may take a bit longer to find its way across the world and into your inbox.

PubSubHubbub is a protocol that allows interested parties to be notified almost immediately when new content is added to a feed, rather than having to wait for a periodic check. It's quickly gaining traction, and is already being used by Blogger, FeedBurner, FriendFeed, LiveJournal, WordPress and more, with plugins available for most other popular blogging software, so there's a good chance that some of your favourite feeds already support it.


What if I don't know the feed URL?

Not to worry, we'll autodetect any available feeds from a website URL, and present you with a list you can choose from.


How can I change my email address?

Simply go into your Account Settings page, edit the Email address field, and click the Update button at the bottom of the page.

We'll send a confirmation email to the new address - just follow the link within, and the change is complete.

Email change


Is there a bookmarklet that I can use?

Yes. Add this Blogtrottr bookmarklet to your favourites (by right clicking and selecting 'Add to favourites' or dragging it to your favourites toolbar), and when you're on a page that you want to follow with Blogtrottr, just click the bookmarklet.

That's lovely, but just what is a bookmarklet?

A bookmarklet is a tiny program contained in a browser bookmark which can be saved and used the same way you use normal bookmarks.

Can I replace the bookmarklet prompt with my email address?

Sure thing, just replace
email=prompt('Please%20enter%20your%20email%20address');
with
email='[email protected]';

Can I subscribe to feeds that require a log in?

If the feed supports basic HTTP authentication, then yes - you can embed a username and password into a URL like this: http(s)://username:[email protected]/feedname.xml
This means of course that we'll have these credentials stored in plain text, and while we won't reveal them to anyone it'd be a sensible precaution to use a unique password, and not one that you use on other sites or services.


Can I add Blogtrottr as a Firefox feed reader?

Yes - Simply click here to add Blogtrottr to your Firefox feed readers.


How do I unsubscribe from a feed?

At the bottom of any update email you get should be an unsubscribe link - you can click that to remove a particular subscription.

Or, you can signup for an account using the email address you used previously, and then you can manage all your existing subscriptions through your web browser.

Alternatively, if your email client supports it, you can one-click unsubscribe.

What tags can I use in my email subjects?

When editing a subscription, you have the option of adding static text or tags to the email subject.

All dates and times are based on your user account timezone setting.

TagDescription
{feed_title} The title of the current feed
{item_title} The title of the current item
{schedule_name} The name of the selected schedule - e.g. 'Daily digest'
{date_d-m-y} The current date, in day-month-year format, with leading zeros and a 4 digit year. e.g. 05-12-2012
{date_m-d-y} The current date, in month-day-year format, with leading zeros and a 4 digit year. e.g. 12-05-2012
{date_y-m-d} The current date, in year-month-day format, with leading zeros and a 4 digit year. e.g. 2012-12-05
{time_h:i:s} The current time, in 24 hour format. e.g. 14:12:32

What do you do about dead or broken feeds?

If a URL hasn't returned any valid feed data (e.g it's returning a 404 error, a domain holding page, or something else that isn't a feed) for more than 6 months, we'll consider it dead and remove subscriptions to it from our system.

Webmasters

Can I put a Blogtrottr form on my website?

Of course! Copy the code below, and replace http://yourfeed with your feed URL.

<form method='post' action='https://blogtrottr.com'>
    Your email: <input type='text' name='btr_email' /><br />
    <input type='hidden' name='btr_url' value='http://yourfeed' />
    <input type='hidden' name='schedule_type' value='0' />
    <input type='submit' value='Follow this feed via email' />
</form>

You can specify different schedules using the schedule_type parameter. The available values are:

0 - Realtime
1 - 2 hourly digest
2 - 4 hourly digest
3 - 6 hourly digest
4 - 8 hourly digest
5 - 12 hourly digest
6 - Daily digest

I don't like forms. Can I use a button?

You certainly can. Help yourself to a button, copy the code below, and replace http://yourfeed with your feed URL.

<a href='https://blogtrottr.com/?subscribe=http://yourfeed' title='Get this feed delivered by email'><img src='/images/icons/blogtrottr-16px.png' alt='Blogtrottr' /></a>

Blogtrottr Blogtrottr Blogtrottr Blogtrottr Blogtrottr

Privacy

How do you use my email address?

You can find full details of our privacy policy on our Policies, Terms and Conditions page.


What cookies do you set on my computer?

You can read more about the cookies we use on our cookies policy page.


Autoblogging

Our stance

Autoblogging is the practice of automatically posting content (usually copied without permission from other sites) to blogs or websites. Here are a selection of well written articles explaining why this is a bad thing.

Due to numerous complaints from content owners about their work being republished, any user accounts detected using Blogtrottr for this purpose will be automatically suspended.

There are many services and software packages out there dedicated to autoblogging, if you feel you must do this, please go and use one of them instead.


Company details

Blogtrottr Ltd is a registered UK company, 08447594.

Registered office (please send all technical and support queries to [email protected]):

Blogtrottr Ltd
71-75 Shelton Street
Covent Garden
London
WC2H 9JQ